Michi recently bought a copy of “Black Knight’s Castle” (set 6086) from someone via eBay. After it finally arrived, we made an unpleasant discovery. While it does seem to have all of the pieces, plus the original box and instructions, it also came impregnated with the smell of cigarette smoke. Real heavy smoke. Yuck.

Not really having a good idea what to do about it, we soaked the bricks in soapy water for a few hours. We sealed the drain in my bathtub with electrical tape (I couldn’t find my duct tape), put all the disassembled bricks into the tub, covered them with warm water and a palmful or so of Dawn antibacterial hand soap. We let them soak for around 3-4 hours, rinsed thoughroughly using a sieve and a large bowl in the sink, then spread out all the pieces on a towel to dry. We left that overnight, and they’re mostly dry. Before bed last night we shook the water out of a bunch of the pieces, and I had to shake the last bits of water out of a few this morning.

We still have the box airing out outside stuffed with newspaper, hoping that will rid it of the smoke. As for the instructions, we had heard that using dryer sheets could help. So Michi is currently putting a dryer sheet between two pieces of notebook paper, and putting that between each pair of pages in the booklet. I’ll post an update later as to how well it worked.

(Update): Huh, forgot to post that update. Yeah, the whole thing worked great. The smoke smell was magically gone! Hooray!